Collecting data is one thing, but making sense of it with natural language queries is quite another. On August 9, Business Intelligence and Analytics firm Tableau acquired ClearGraph in a bid to help improve the way that organizations search and discover data.

"Whether you’re an executive who needs a top-level answer quickly, on a mobile phone or want to search for a particular answer, the ability to interact with your data through a conversational style search simplifies how you get answers quickly," Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer at Tableau Software, wrote in a blog post. "Acquiring ClearGraph will help us accelerate our efforts to bring NLP to Tableau and help customers make the most of their data."

The integration of ClearGraph with Tableau is seen as a natural fit by ClearGraph's founders.

"We founded ClearGraph because we saw a need to bridge the gap between humans and computers through natural language, especially when it comes to exploring data,” Andrew Vigneault, CEO of ClearGraph, said in a statement. "Tableau is a natural fit for us because we have similar missions, cultures and genuine desire to help more people around the world access, interact with and get answers from their data."

Financial terms of the ClearGraph acquisition were not publicly disclosed and followed the release of Tableau's second quarter fiscal 2017 earnings. For the quarter, Tableau generated $212.9 million in revenue for a 7 percent year-over-year gain.

"Customers accelerated their adoption of our subscription offerings in Q2, and have embraced subscription even faster than we had projected," Adam Selipsky, President and Chief Executive Officer of Tableau, said in a statement. "The move to a subscription model represents our ongoing commitment to helping our customers adopt and scale Tableau with greater flexibility and reduced risk."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.